This statement was written by members of Twin Cities DSA. We are posting it in solidarity.
On January 7th, ICE agents murdered Renee Nicole Good, a U.S. citizen, in broad daylight during the fascist Trump administration’s latest immigration operation in Minneapolis. Just yesterday, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) head Kristi Noem, armed with a newly bloated annual operating budget of $18.7 billion dollars, appeared in the Twin Cities boasting about the largest immigration enforcement operation ever, with 2,000 federal agents dispatched to harass, racially profile, arrest, and now kill Minnesotans.
Good, who according to witnesses stopped to record ICE activity, was leaving the scene in her car when an ICE agent shot her multiple times and subsequently denied medical aid. Her murder, now circulating globally in several viral videos, is yet another instance of the violence that ICE is carrying out in communities all over the country. Though the videos show that Good was leaving when she was murdered, DHS is attempting to cover up the murder by claiming “self defense” and publicly disparaging their victim.
While Mayor of Minneapolis Jacob Frey’s words, “ICE get the fuck out of Minneapolis,” sound good, the racist, Islamophobic rhetoric which he has enabled over the past year has only contributed to the situation. Numerous Minnesota politicians are also calling for ICE to leave the state. It should not have taken a murder for politicians to ask for this minimal demand.
DSA demands the abolition of ICE, which terrorizes our neighborhoods and makes everyone, regardless of citizenship status, less safe. As the Trump administration attempts to increase detention numbers at all costs, enriching his donors in the private prison lobby, 2025 marked the deadliest year for people in ICE custody since its creation, with 32 confirmed deaths.
We stand in solidarity with the members of the Central and Powderhorn communities, brave community members who stood up to ICE after this horrific act of violence, and most importantly, with the family of the woman who died protecting the freedoms of others. We commit to continuing our efforts to resist illegal ICE terror and defend our communities against the attacks of the Trump Administration.
Contact your representatives using this tool to oppose more money for ICE and CBP in the FY26 DHS appropriations bill which is getting conferenced as we speak. The message is simple: Don’t give ICE one more penny to jail immigrants in the FY26 DHS spending bill.
As this fascist administration continues to attack our rights, our neighbors, and our communities, we must remember the strength and solidarity we showed only a few years ago during the 2020 Uprising following the horrific murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. The Twin Cities showed us then, as they do now, the courage to fight back against those who seek to destroy us. And we know that when we fight, we win. Solidarity forever.
Hello comrades! It’s Jackie, your friendly neighborhood NWI DSA Co-Chair- here to present the May 2025 recap for our chapter.
Chapter Announcements
As of our June meeting we now have a full Steering Committee again! More details to come in the June newsletter.
Two June actions coming up on the 21st and 28th respectively at MLK Jr. Park in East Chicago, check our social media for more details!
Campaigns and Events
In May we started working with local organizers from NWI Community Solidarity, a group focused primarily on organizing for immigrant rights and Palestinian liberation, alongside coalition work on other issues. They are known in the area for hosting weekly Palestine vigils, as shown in the example older poster below from their Instagram page @nwicommunitysolidarity. We see NWICS as aligned with NWI DSA’s goals of building and strengthening a structured foundation for community struggle.
On May 30th, we also attended the Timebank Community Potluck, a potluck co-hosted by local mutual aid groups NWI Region Resilience and Joy Bomb Social Center. Timebanking works by having community members offer or request different services, transacting in ‘hours’ rather than money, goods, etc. Events like this potluck also count towards these hours, where people ‘deposit’ the time they spent making food and/or attending the potluck.
Notable Internal Developments
On May 8th, we held a chapter meeting with a built-in social afterwards. Chapter members Eve B and Jackie H (myself) were elected as delegate and alternate respectively for the upcoming 2025 National DSA Convention, which will be held this August in Chicago. As your alternate delegate, I am excited to help Eve represent our chapter in national DSA deliberation! You can learn more about the 2025 DSA Convention here: https://convention2025.dsausa.org/
As mentioned in the previous newsletter, Red Reading Group by NWI DSA got to read Value, Price and Profit by Karl Marx and discuss it on May 14th. We excited to announce our next text, Michael Parenti’s Against Empire. Parenti is a often mentioned in socialist circles as an excellent writer on US intervention and exploitation of the Global South. As socialists living in the imperial core, it is crucial that we actively work to deprogram the biases that are instilled to apologize and advocate for the continued extraction of superprofits from Global South workers. The chapter has purchased physical copies of this book and are in the process of distributing it to participating reading group members. In the meantime, folks who’d like to read a condensed article discussing modern capitalist imperialism are recommended to check out this Monthly Review article summarizing Unequal Exchange: https://monthlyreview.org/2025/03/01/arghiri-emmanuel-and-unequal-exchange-past-present-and-future-relevance/
Hello comrades! It’s Jackie, your friendly neighborhood Membership Coordinator- here to present the March-April 2025 recap for our chapter. Since March was a quieter time for us as a chapter, we opted to combine it with April.
Chapter Announcements
The chapter Steering Committee has multiple openings due to members in the process of moving or stepping down. We encourage comrades of all experience levels to help lead your local DSA! Email us at northwest.indiana.dsa@gmail.com if interested.
Next General Meeting for the chapter will be on June 12th, 6PM-7:30PM CST, Valparaiso Public Library.
Campaigns and Events
March was a quieter month for us here at NWI DSA, though that’s not to say it was a quiet month for Northwest Indiana! Headed up by the local student-ran nonprofit Hispanic Student Association, a coalition protest between them and NWI DSA, BLM Gary, Just Transition NWI, Students for Justice In Palestine PNW, and AFT Indiana took place in Highland. As the original Instagram post notes, this coalition represents solidarity on key issues troubling the people of Northwest Indiana, including immigration, healthcare, environmental justice, and more.
The protest had an estimated attendance of around 30 people, and featured speakers from some of the attending groups. We are elated to see the growth of organized action HSA is helping to build, particularly considering the young age of its organizers! We stand in solidarity with the organized left of Northwest Indiana and continue to work on fostering connections with the rest of our community.
In other news, on April 17th we hosted our first Socialism 101 educational event!
This event focused on teaching basic concepts of what terms like capitalism, socialism and materialism really mean from a Marxist perspective. As socialists we understand that capitalism has inherent contradictions that cannot simply be resolved via reform. We understand organizing for reform, electoral struggle, and more as pieces of a greater puzzle, and that in order to truly address the issues of capitalism we must ultimately replace it with socialism. We believe that socialist education is extremely important in this task, as it gives us context and a coherent framework to work off of, making organizing efforts more focused and effective. We cannot reasonably expect to affect change without first understanding what we want, why things are the way they are now, and analyzing what we can learn from both successful and unsuccessful attempts of the past. We thank the comrades and the curious folks who attended this meeting, and look forward to seeing more folks and more events like this in the future!
Notable Internal Developments
We’re ecstatic to have established the Red Reading Group by NWI DSA, which met for the first time on May 14th, 8PM.
We chose our first text, Karl Marx’s Value, Price and Profit at our April General Meeting, due to it being a popular recommendation as an introductory Marxist text. It’s a fairly short pamphlet, where Marx delves into some concepts about where value comes from (spoiler: it’s labor), and argues against the beliefs of some of his contemporaries that struggle over wages would simply result in equal movement compensating for it elsewhere in the workforce. In other words, Marx is arguing against talking points that we still encounter today, that a raise for one group of workers necessarily means a pay cut for other workers, or just results in an equal raise in cost. Capitalists extract profit from the difference between the value worker labor creates, and the substantially smaller value the workers are actually compensated for. This difference can and should be struggled against. We can see real world results of wage struggle, for example comparing the ratio between CEO pay and worker pay in different companies, countries, etc. Of course, we must understand that even if won these reforms are ultimately only temporary and are always being fought against by the owning classes, however despite this they are indeed tangible struggles that affect real improvement in the lives of workers. We must not only fight for change within the system, but fight for the ability to change out of it!
Other Local Action
NWI DSA member Michael H recently attended his first Porter County Council meeting, on April 22nd. Shared below are his thoughts:
Here are some observations from the April 22nd Porter County Council Meeting. For the most part it seemed to be pretty standard administrative stuff. There was a long and detailed presentation about the DLZ corporation’s renovation which did get a lot of scrutiny from the board for which the company was well prepared. One particularly amusing moment occurred when a board member questioned whether they could use more durable material in padded cells so that inmates couldn’t damage them as easily. They were told that would defeat the entire purpose of the cells. It seems like a silly question, but I guess you have to ask these things just in case. The requested funds were approved unanimously. Porter County Parks and Recreation also had all their substantial requests passed unanimously and weren’t grilled nearly as much about the price tag despite asking for amounts in excess of 100 thousand dollars. There were also assorted smaller requests of a few hundred dollars which also didn’t get much pushback.
What I found most interesting is how much scrutiny requests of a few thousand dollars got from the council, especially if those requests were for things like training or raises for staff. That was when council members remembered that things like SB1, tariffs, and federal budgets are going to start affecting them. Right now it seems that they prefer cutting budgets to raising taxes, and the focus seems to be on things that aren’t going to be as immediately obvious to voters for the moment.
Announcing Red Reading Group by NWI DSA, our new chapter reading group! For our first meeting we will be reading Chapters 1 thru 7 of Value, Price and Profit by Karl Marx. We are currently targeting a first meeting date sometime between our Socialism 101 on April 17th and our May 2025 General Meeting on May 8th. More details to come soon, stay tuned!
We welcome non-members to get involved with this and other activities in our chapter.If you’d like to get involved with us even as a non-member, feel free to reach out to us at: northwest.indiana.dsa@gmail.com
Hello comrades! It’s Jackie, your friendly neighborhood Social Media Coordinator- here to present the February 2025 recap for our chapter.
Chapter Announcements
The chapter Steering Committee has openings for a new chapter Treasurer and chapter Secretary.
Next General Meeting for the chapter will be on April 1st, 6PM CST, location TBD.
Campaigns and Events
During mid-February, we hosted the NWI Organizing Fair at Joy Bomb Social Center in Lake Station, IN. In a bittersweet state of affairs, we unfortunately had some big cancellations from groups who realized they were unable to make it, but despite this we still observed a pleasantly surprising turnout of around 30 people! We thank our attending groups NWI Green Party and NWI Medicare for All for their presence and respective speakers who made the event special for our individual attendees. NWI DSA member Brandon Dothager also gave a few encouraging words to our small crowd. To any readers who attended yourselves, thank you again for coming, and we plan on hosting some more fun events soon! Stay tuned.
Notable Internal Developments
The proposed Chapter Bylaws amendment has been reworked into an entirely new set of proposed bylaws by chapter Co-Chair Eve, co-signed by several other members of the chapter. This set of bylaws aims to give fresh, more fleshed-out definitions for the structure of the chapter, overhauling the comparatively modest reforms of the previous amendment drafts.
The NWI DSA Steering Committee is gearing up to host several trainings in the near future, including another session of DSA 101 for our new members since the last general meeting as well as a possible DSA 102 and Robert’s Rules 101. These trainings will provide introductions to DSA and basic principles of running meetings, which aim to help members get comfortable with DSA and develop their organizing skills.
Our chapter has a new opening for a Chapter Treasurer position on the Steering Committee. If you are a Member and have any experience in accounting, treasury, or related activities, please consider reaching out to the Steering Committee at northwest.indiana.dsa@gmail.com. NWI DSA is not separately incorporated as a 501(c)4, so the level of work is not as high as a full-on separate legal entity.
Other Local Action
Several members of the chapter have continued working in collaboration with other local organizers regarding anti-deportation.* As our fascist state makes plays to attack undocumented people in our communities, we must do what we can to help protect them from the clutches of special bodies of armed enforcers.
*At the time of writing there was a recent coalition protest organized by the local Hispanic Student Association that NWI DSA partially participated in organizing. This event will be covered in next month’s March newsletter.
Hello comrades! It’s Jackie, your friendly neighborhood Social Media Coordinator- here to present the January 2025 recap for our chapter.
Wait, this is new…
Indeed it is! This recap is part of an initiative from your Steering Committee to better keep chapter members and supporters in touch with the activities of the chapter, as well as some commentary on local and national politics where convenient. Without further ado- let’s get into the meat and potatoes here.
Chapter Announcements
Routine general membership meetings have been established and will henceforth occur on the first Friday of every month, at 6:00 P.M. beginning March 7th.
A social media whitelist has been established. The Social Media Coordinator may freely repost content from these accounts at their own discretion, without requiring prior approval from the Steering Committee.
State of Politics Under Trump
You probably saw this topic coming. Trump’s presidency has started off strong, and not in a good way. On day one of inauguration, he signed several executive orders attacking the rights of Americans in various ways, and a little over a week in we’re starting to see the effects of these. Whether it’s increased ICE activity with the promise of future mass deportations, the freezing of passport applications with an ‘X’ gender marker or changed gender, or a mass freeze on many federal aid programs that was ‘rescinded’ but then not actually– Trump is surely marking his 2024 term as a “memorable” one. We continue to keep close tabs on developments in these anti-human activities; this example list is definitely not all-inclusive and yet another development seems to arrive with each passing day.
In times like these it can seem nigh impossible to maintain hope, motivation, or even a healthy mental state. There is a distinct sense of tension and despair in the American left right now that no one can ignore. For some, there is understandably a strong urge to lock yourself away from the outside world and maintain some kind of bubble away from it all. Naturally, this is luxury many of the affected cannot afford, but still an understandable response. For what it’s worth, if the state of things is plunging you into a time of crisis, we encourage you to reach out to any and all resources you have and need. This may include family and friends, of course, but also community resources. Below we link just a few examples of good resources for people who need it or know others that do:
As an individual, we may suffer, but as communities, together, we can channel suffering into invaluable mutual support for each other and come closer together than ever. A principled study of history will show that these cycles of immense suffering and large-scale crisis are not a bug, but a feature of capitalism. It is with this in mind that we must do what we can to foster the path to socialism. If you are personally in crisis- this may mean sitting it out for a bit, gathering yourself together. There is no shame in this, in fact more than that it is entirely correct if that’s the situation you are in. For those with the ability to participate in organizing, there is no greater need for socialist organizing than the here and now.
Campaigns and Events
Last month, we sent out a survey to all chapter members asking what general campaign topics you would be most interested in organizing around, ranging from environmental action, utility activism, LGBTQ+ rights, and more. If you haven’t filled out this survey already, we encourage you to do so here. With the responses from this survey, and gauging of local sentiment at the upcoming NWI Organizing Fair, the Steering Committee will help put together some initial information to propose a chapter campaign!
Speaking of the fair- that’s still happening! If you’ve been following our emails and/or social media, you’ll know that we had to push the date back from late January to February 15th. But come February 15th, 4PM-7PM CT, we look forward to seeing you! We’re excited to have some very notable local organizations attending, including Citizens Action Coalition, Just Transition NWI, and NWI Pride!
New Resolutions, Notable Internal Developments
Several important chapter resolutions are being worked on at the moment. The most major is a proposed amendment to the Chapter Bylaws originated by chapter Co-Chairs Mitch & Eve. If passed, this amendment will make several changes to the chapter structure, including transitioning the ‘Social Media Coordinator’ Steering Committee position to the more broad ‘Membership Coordinator’, and redefining what constitutes a valid quorum for chapter votes. These resolutions aim to help improve the democratic validity of the chapter’s structure as well as its effectiveness.
Chapter Social Media Coordinator Jackie (me) is originating a resolution for a 2025 Internet Outreach Strategy for the Chapter. After a motion to streamline the chapter social media approval process at the 1/25 NWI DSA Steering Committee meeting, we almost immediately witnessed a small burst in traction on our social media profiles after more basic activity was made easier. Introduced in this motion was a whitelist of friendly local organizations as well as DSA profiles, from which the Social Media Coordinator is allowed to autonomously repost from with discretion. Continuing on this, the 2025 Internet Outreach Strategy will outline additional online strategies to increase engagement, and if passed ultimately aim to help increase chapter growth and recognition.
Another simple but important outcome of the 1/25 Steering Committee meeting was the passing of a regular chapter meeting schedule. Starting March 7th, general chapter meetings will be held the first Friday of each month, at 6pm CT. The chapter Steering Committee will meet roughly every two weeks, the next being on February 7th. Co-Chair Eve is working to get the rest of the Steering Committee caught up to speed with resources from the national DSA, especially with regard to web tools for organizing events and managing data.
Other Local Action
Members of our DSA chapter recently had the opportunity to participate in some inspiring non-DSA local action. Back in November, members from NWI Green Party, Citizens Action Coalition, and more were able to pack hearings for the proposed NIPSCO Electric Utility Rate Hike- read more here. This proposal from NIPSCO would raise NIPSCO customer electric bills by an average of $45 per month! On a positive note, a resolution against the proposal (authored by the NWI Greens) was passed by Portage City Council. Still, evidentiary hearings for the NIPSCO proposal will begin in Indianapolis on February 5th, and Citizens Action Coalition expects the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission to come to a final order in the third quarter of 2025.
Earlier this month, we participated with Save Briar East Woods in packing the 1/13 Hammond City Council meeting to save this unprotected land from being decimated by an unnecessary road project. We heard from many passionate individuals as well as local members of Save Briar East Woods plea from both heart and mind to the Hammond City Council- so many people attended the meeting that the seating was nearly completely full! Nonetheless this continues to be a long and hard-fought battle. You can read more about the Save Briar East Woods project on the Hessville Dune Dusters Facebook page.
Friends and comrades, our venue for the NWI Organizing Fair unfortunately had a pipe burst and flood the building, so we have had to reschedule the event for February 15th, 4PM-7PM CST. If you’d like to support Joy Bomb Social Center, you can do so at https://opencollective.com/…/projects/joybombsocialcenter Thanks for your understanding!
In solidarity, Jackie Hanlon (she/they) NWI DSA Steering Committee
Welcome all, whether chapter members and others, to our new website!
As a small piece of breathing some new structure and reinvigorating the chapter, we are publishing this new chapter website. Alongside our social media profiles, this will serve as a home for the public face of our chapter, and will be something we will include in public-facing promotional material. While this will by no means ‘replace’ social media, we hope that this can help simplify the experience for new potential comrades who aren’t necessarily heavy users of the internet and especially social media specifically. With that in mind, we are looking to start creating blog posts that will serve as a semi-regular ‘newsletter’ for the chapter. This will highlight things like recent actions of the chapter, public statements, and more for those interested in following our chapter activity.
We hope you are as excited as we are, and look forward to seeing you at our next chapter meeting, activity, or public event!
Northwest Indiana DSA 